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Dignity & Power Now's Abolition-Rooted Glossary of Terms
DPN's Abolition-Rooted Glossary of Terms is a living resource was created to reflect the language, values, and vision of our movement. Too often, words tied to justice, safety, and reform are misused or stripped of their radical meaning. This glossary reclaims and defines key terms through an abolitionist lens, ensuring that community members, organizers, and allies can engage with clarity, shared understanding, and accountability.
By grounding our campaigns and conversations in a common vocabulary, the glossary supports deeper political education, humanizing community members, stronger organizing, and a collective path toward ending incarceration, state violence, and systemic harm.
Prison Industrial Complex:
“The prison industrial complex (PIC) is a term we use to describe the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems.
Through its reach and impact, the PIC helps and maintains the authority of people who get their power through racial, economic and other privileges. There are many ways this power is collected and maintained through the PIC, including creating mass media images that keep alive stereotypes of people of color, poor people, queer people, immigrants, youth, and other oppressed communities as criminal, delinquent, or deviant. This power is also maintained by earning huge profits for private companies that deal with prisons and police forces; helping earn political gains for ‘tough on crime’ politicians; increasing the influence of prison guard and police unions; and eliminating social and political dissent by oppressed communities that make demands for self-determination and reorganization of power in the US.” - Critical Resistance
Prison Abolition:
“PIC abolition is a political vision with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment.
From where we are now, sometimes we can’t really imagine what abolition is going to look like. Abolition isn’t just about getting rid of buildings full of cages. It’s also about undoing the society we live in because the PIC both feeds on and maintains oppression and inequalities through punishment, violence, and controls millions of people. Because the PIC is not an isolated system, abolition is a broad strategy. An abolitionist vision means that we must build models today that can represent how we want to live in the future. It means developing practical strategies for taking small steps that move us toward making our dreams real and that lead us all to believe that things really could be different. It means living this vision in our daily lives.
Abolition is both a practical organizing tool and a long-term goal.” - Critical Resistance
Abolitionist Reform:
“Abolitionist (non-reformist) reform is a practical effort or step that changes aspects of the prison industrial complex towards completely dismantling the system. Abolitionist reforms do not increase the scope, scale, or life of the prison industrial complex, rather they either take power away from these systems (ie. through control measures or defunding) or they grow community based alternatives that are needed in order to ensure the dismantling of the PIC.” - Critical Resistance
Healing Justice:
“Healing Justice is a framework that identifies how we can holistically respond to and intervene on intergenerational trauma and violence, and to bring collective practices that can impact and transform the consequences of oppression on our collective bodies, hearts and minds.” - Cara Page.
Healing is an ongoing process of mending as well as building power, resilience, and resistance to transform systems of oppression. Without healing there is no justice. We understand that healing is a lifelong process and that often we never fully heal, especially when our loved ones are killed unjustly. We also understand that if we do not participate in a process of healing, the pain caused by state violence can overwhelm us as well as our communities. Holding these two truths we honor the need to be in healing processes, including the process of demanding justice for our loved ones.
We support the healing of our communities not only because we deserve wellbeing, but also because the power required to win our people’s wellbeing is the power required to win all other visionary demands for justice.
Transformative Justice:
Transformative Justice (TJ) is a structural approach to harm response and reduction, which does not amplify and perpetuate violence, but instead encourages community accountability and restoration. Transformative justice understands that what happens in our interpersonal relationships is reflected and supported by larger systems, and thus seeks to transform harmful power imbalances and social norms to transform the conditions that lead to interpersonal harm and violence.
At its most basic, TJ seeks to respond to violence without creating more violence. Transformative justice responses and interventions:
- Do not rely of the state (police, prisons, the criminal legal system, I.C.E., foster care system;
- Do not reinforce or perpetuate violence such as oppressive norms or vigilantism; and most importantly;
- Actively cultivate the things we know prevent violence such as healing, accountability, resilience, and safety for all involved.
The three questions a process of transformative justice might ask are: What social circumstances promoted the harmful behavior? What structural similarities exist between this incident and others like it? What measures could prevent future occurrences?
“The criminal punishment system promises accountability for violence, but we know that in actuality it is a form of targeted violence against poor people, people with disabilities, and people of color, and doesn’t reduce violence in our society. Real accountability calls us to respond to harm that occurs because the person responsible was struggling with mental illness by providing high-quality treatment. If violence emerged because of poverty and desperation, then creating survivable conditions might prevent future harm. If violence originated because of unexamined misogyny or sexism learned in the family or broader culture, a community process that invites the person responsible to examine would be more likely to lead to a positive outcome than incarceration in a cell, where the person is likely to experience more violence. Finally, in a truly transformative model of justice, we would not allow those harms to be shielded by powerful people or institutions. We would insist on focusing not just on individuals but also the institutions and structures that perpetuate, foster, and maintain interpersonal violence.” - Mariame Kaba
Community/Collective Power:
We understand rapid response as an important practice of building our communities’ capacity to end a continuous and varying onslaught of state violence. Building strong community networks that can respond to law enforcement violence, support impacted families, and demand that our individual and collective resilience be upheld are all components of this visionary work. Doing so moves us closer towards replacing punitive and terrorizing systems with a society where the dignity and power of Black and Brown communities is unquestionably resourced and sustained.
System-Impacted:
"System impacted" refers to those whose lives have been affected by the criminal punishment system. This includes people who have experienced incarceration, arrest, and/or police violence, and those whose family members and loved ones have experienced incarceration, arrest, and/or police violence.
School-to-Prison Pipeline:
“The school-to-prison pipeline refers to the policies and practices that push our nation’s schoolchildren, especially our most at-risk children, out of classrooms and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. This pipeline reflects the prioritization of incarceration over education.” - ACLU
People First Language
People First Language asks us to name someone’s humanity before their carceral status. This means, rather than using language which labels someone entirely by the violence they’ve experienced — ex: “inmate” — we use language which affirms someone as a whole human being who experienced violence — ex: “formerly incarcerated person” or “person in prison.”
“The language we use to identify human beings, their conditions, circumstances, and the many aspects of their identities is powerful. It can be used as a weapon to vilify entire communities and groups of people, or it can be used in a way that fosters inclusivity and empathy and removes biases and prejudices. Being thoughtful, intentional, inclusive, and supportive is a cornerstone of Care First culture.” - Care First CA